It’s here – The most flexible commerce platform powering the rising digital-first economy

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Today we are publicly announcing Fabric, the world’s most modular commerce platform for retail, D2C and B2B companies. The first of its kind, Fabric is a modern solution that can be up and running in weeks, to replace the expensive legacy platform that is holding your business back from performance and growth.

Fabric’s open and scalable platform was developed to empower mid-market and established businesses to drive business growth without the cost, time and complexity of monolithic legacy solutions. Most of these legacy commerce platforms are fragile, insecure, hard to improve, and take months to years to implement. The Fabric platform combines a powerful commerce API engine with intuitive business applications, built on extensible, single-tenant SaaS. Companies can achieve fast time-to-value, gain access to modern and intuitive tools teams will love, all on a zero-maintenance scalable and secure commerce platform.

Fabric is led by a team of extremely dedicated professionals with a combined 50+ years of experience in enterprise commerce & product leadership. Stemming from roles at Staples, eBay, Dell, Intel, and Lowes, our team has cultivated a passion for creating simple yet powerful solutions required to match the ever-changing pace of commerce. Starting in early 2017, Fabric went into stealth development to build the world’s new commerce operating system. We took a very methodical and refined approach to product development to ensure our platform technology can outperform expectations before opening it to a broader audience. Because commerce software is mission-critical to our customers, we spent hundreds of thousands of hours battle-testing and iterating with rigor to make certain our platform can meet the demands of their business.

Fabric is venture-backed by Expa and Redpoint Ventures. Their support is instrumental in helping us build the momentum needed for a world-class team and aggressive go-to-market.

 

Macro-view: An eCommerce-first world

On a macro level, this quickly evolving pandemic is further changing how consumers and businesses shop and procure products. Retail establishments are being forced to close to support social distancing, so eCommerce and “buy online & pick up” is being thrust into the forefront as your primary channel of business. While these shocks have happened in the last few weeks in the US and around the globe, we believe the move to an eCommerce-first economy is a relentless and lasting force that will continue for months and years ahead. The pandemic is simply an accelerant.

 

Case Study: How we’re helping right now

One of our customers, abc carpet & home, is an iconic brand in NYC who sells over $100M in furniture, home goods, and carpets, in addition to running 3 award-winning restaurants. All of these businesses under the abc carpet & home brand, which are located in a landmark building on broadway ave in the heart of New York City, were forced to temporarily shut its doors earlier this week and for the foreseeable future. Just 3 weeks ago, abchome.com was transitioned from a legacy Magento site to Fabric’s platform. Since then, abc carpet & home’s eCommerce business has seen a 200% increase in conversion and sales are up over 250%. Fabric now gives abc carpet & home the opportunity to adapt quickly and ultimately thrive in an eCommerce-first world.

 

What you can do

While the outlook of the economy and your business may be clouded in the fog of these very uncertain times, it’s the smart businesses and tech leaders who use this opportunity to invest for adaptability, scalability, and efficiency. These leaders will ultimately thrive in a time of change, while the ones who hunker down with fear and uncertainty will be left behind.

Reach out to our team of commerce experts, to evaluate how we can move your business forward, fast. As the world is changing we are here to help and be a resource.

 

FAQs

Can you explain in detail, what Fabric’s products are?

Fabric’s offerings consist of the following:

1. Experience Platform is a headless CMS and sub-second storefront, that can quickly replace your existing webstore that is slow, buggy, and lacks features

2. Commerce Platform is a full suite of headless commerce APIs to power your site and other channels like social, marketplace, affiliates, B2B/wholesale. These modular APIs replace your legacy Oracle, Magento, Shopify Plus, Salesforce or Custom built systems that are extremely expensive, complex, and hard to scale.

3. CoPilot Applications is a powerful set of apps for your merchants and marketers comprised of an enterprise-grade PIM to support large catalogs, a Pricing and Promotion engine to tailor offers for each of your customer segments, a segmentation engine to build audiences so you can target content, products, offers and more to specific groups of customers, and an insights engine to provide reports to drive your business and improve the customer experiences.

What is “Headless”?

Headless is a term used by consultants to explain the separation of the view layer (storefront) v. the eCommerce engine (platform). Your current commerce platform is likely a monolithic product that does not provide this separation. That means changes to the backend must be fully aligned to changes to the front-end, leading to slow development releases of 1–2 months that typically break things. Because Fabric is modular, and we provide both the head (storefront) and headless APIs, changes can happen quickly without impacting other parts of the experience. Fabric releases updates continuously. Imagine your eCommerce store getting intra-day improvements! This is a similar technology that only the largest companies in the world, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, can provide. Now you can also have that same power of speed and flexibility with Fabric.

How can Fabric move so quickly? I’ve heard from my IT team it will take 12–16 months to “re-platform”!?

Fabric’s platform is modular. This means you can roll out in an evolutionary approach that solves for your current pain points or opportunities very quickly, within weeks. You don’t need to completely rip and replace your current platform. Fabric can take the lead and overtime “eat” your old platform. In the software industry, this is known as the Strangler Method.

With Fabric, it’s now possible to launch a new site within weeks, with a new design and sub-second performance.

With Fabric, it’s now possible to reconfigure your site to be CMS driven, to give your marketing team flexibility to build your brand’s content and have it work seamlessly with commerce features.

With Fabric, you can replace the old legacy eCommerce platforms without interrupting or slowing down your customer experience projects.

Is Fabric Software as a Service?

Yes, Fabric is cloud-first and fully offered as a service. You have nothing to maintain — no data centers, no IT staff, nothing. It’s enterprise-grade secured and scalable software hosted as a single tenant Cloud offering. That means your data is not shared with other companies, the Fabric code runs behind several layers of security in a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).

Who Architected Fabric?

Fabric’s founders have over 50 years of combined experience as executives leading eCommerce P/L, Product, and Technology at 3 companies (Dell, eBay Marketplaces, & Staples)with over $10B in eCommerce revenue. Additionally, Fabric’s team is made up of subject matter experts and technologists who have worked at Walmart, Flipkart, Google, and many other hyper-scale eCommerce and Cloud teams.

Fabric’s entire platform is built on “Serverless” technology. This means we have the full power and backing of the public clouds, which give near-infinite scale. Fabric’s platform was architected with similar real-time principles as companies like Netflix, to ensure sub-second experiences, at scale, globally, across all devices. Fabric’s platform was also architected for high security and compliance. Fabric runs in a single tenant VPC model, so your commerce is highly secure and performance is never impacted by others.


Topics: News
Mari Ström

Global strategy and field marketing @ fabric. Previously @ Suplari and Accenture.

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